Louisiana Educator: The Most Powerful Predictor of Student Performance

Louisiana Educator: The Most Powerful Predictor of Student Performance:

The Most Powerful Predictor of Student Performance

The public school accountability system in Louisiana as in most other states is based primarily upon student performance on standardized testing. Louisiana has gone so far as to give schools and school systems a letter grade for performance based primarily on student test performance. Based upon these ratings, pronouncements are often made to the public and to lawmakers about the quality of the schools and teacher effectiveness in individual school systems. Here is an example of education officials blaming teachers:
In the Louisiana application for the ESEA waiver of No Child Left Behind, Superintendent John White criticized the results of past teacher evaluations in Louisiana that yielded a high percentage of proficient teacher ratings even though more than one third of Louisiana students were not achieving at grade level on annual state assessments.

Is it correct to assume that the quality of teaching in a particular school system can be equated to the performance of its students on the state standardized testing system, or could there be other factors that affect student performance other than the quality of instruction? Do the letter grades given to our individual schools and school systems really reflect the quality of instruction in those systems?

The following analysis and table compares the student performance in each of the 74 public school systems in Louisiana with an accepted measure of student poverty (the percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced lunch). Using the latest LDOE analysis of state testing, school systems are ranked according to overall student performance along with the Louisiana Educator: The Most Powerful Predictor of Student Performance: